LINUX Asia 2004: Showcasing the Power of FLOSS in New Delhi

A conversation with one of the planners of India's upcoming event to demonstrate what FLOSS offers all market segments.

Linux for You, India's year-old free/libre and
open-source software (FLOSS) magazine, has taken on an ambitious job: organising
a major event in New Delhi in February that is targeted at all of Asia, not only India.
This will be the most ambitious event of its kind to be organised in North
India. From February 11-13, the LINUX Asia 2004 event hopes to demonstrate "the
power and benefits of [GNU]Linux and FLOSS to decision makers".

I recently spoke with Rahul Chopra, the techie-scion of the EFY-LFY
Publishing company, about what is involved in planning this event and
what the event will offer.

Linux Journal: What is the plan
for the 2004 GNU/Linux meeting in Delhi?

Rahul Chopra: LINUX Asia 2004 has with the
sole aim of demonstrating to the decision makers the power of open source and GNU/Linux. Hence, in addition to an expo
and five simultaneous tracks of conferences (including two workshops), LINUX
Asia will have 100-plus Linux PCs on site to demonstrate different applications.

So, if a managing director or an SME wants to know how he can save licensing
costs without sacrificing the productivity of his team, LINUX Asia is the
place to be. If an IT secretary (top-level bureaucrat) of a state or regional
government wants to know how his e-governance initiatives can do more for
less, LINUX Asia will be a great place to check that out. If a CIO wants to
see how Linux is the perfect choice for clustering, this event will
provide the demo for him.

LJ: What prompted your new, only a year
old, GNU/Linux magazine to go for it with this meeting?

RC: We realised that no matter how much we stress
the benefits of open source and Linux through the media, it remains
merely talk. To make others "walk the talk" we had to demonstrate the
walk and its benefits ourselves.

This event was conceptualised with the primary goal of providing first-hand
demonstrations of the powers of Linux and open source. Our target audience
for the how to save money theme includes general industry, the
government and social sector initiatives, such as educational institutes and
NGOs.

Another goal is to demonstrate to existing IT entrepreneurs how
they can make money in the open-source paradigm. We all know that it's very
different from the proprietary model, and many are confused about how to get
on to this new bus called the open source business-model, which seems to be
gaining speed. No one wants to be left out. But a fate worse than being left out would be
to get off the proprietary business-model bus and not be able to catch
the open source business-model bus either. So, we are calling on eminent speakers
from across the globe, many from Asia, to explain how they succeeded and
to discuss their own mantras of success. Thus, our second goal can be summarized as how
to make money from open source.

LJ: How has the response been so far?

RC: It's been very encouraging. Our
goal to have our partners signed on before December 15, 2003, was accomplished.
We now are working with the US-based
Technetra Corp, which is managing the
content of the event.

SERCON, India's number one show management firm, is handling
LINUX Asia's show too. Delhi-based Tetra, a firm that has been into Linux
implementations for the past seven years, has agreed to manage the hub.
Then we got a major boost when MAIT (a major IT hardware trade body in
India) joined us as a co-organiser, promising major support in promoting the
event to the industry. As of now, the support couldn't be better.

LJ: How will this show be different
from other attempts, say Linux-Bangalore, which is held in
December each year?

RC: Linux-Bangalore is a premium event that focuses more on technology aspects,
current and future. LINUX Asia will focus more on
selling--demonstrating, rather--this technology to the decision makers.
In a nutshell, LINUX Asia 2004 is summarized by its two goals, how to make money and how to
save money.

LJ: Why do you feel the Delhi show has a good chance of succeeding?

RC: Although Bangalore and Hyderabad are
the names that first come to mind when one talks of India's IT industry,
if you group New Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida together [all cities around
the national capital], you have a bigger IT industry than the Bangalore
and Hyderabad combined.

Delhi also offers access to the decision makers in the central
government and seven state governments, including Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal
Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Efforts are on to get
government representations from other Indian states, too.

Finally, in terms of the enterprise sector, Delhi definitely is ahead of
them all, except India's commercial capital of Mumbai, formerly Bombay. Thus, Delhi
offers a very attractive opportunity to reach out to the IT industry,
governments and the industry.

LJ: Can you tell us how the year-old, first-ever Indian GNU/Linux
magazine LINUX For You is doing?

RC:LINUX For You is doing better than we initially planned, and it's all
thanks to the incredible support we have received from our readers. The
challenge we face every month is managing the huge amount of content within
the budgeted 100 pages.

And, we have tons of content to squeeze in. To make sure that we are
packing in nothing but the best, we recently initiated a feedback scheme
to learn what our readers want. Hopefully, with the summarization of
these feedbacks coming soon, we will have an even better
LINUX For You for our readers.

LJ: For years, major magazines felt
there was no market for a GNU/Linux magazine. Why did
you venture into it?

RC: I think it goes back to our roots. EFY as a group came into being with the
magazine Electronics For You, which launched in 1968 when Indians were
still to see the miracle called television. Our journey from an initial print order of 2,000 copies to the current
status of being one of South Asia's most popular electronics magazine has been an
exciting one. We felt that Linux and open source promised the similar
challenges and opportunities, hence we decided to go ahead with India's first
magazine dedicated to open source.

Frankly, with techies ruling the roost of EFY, technology was a bigger
factor than long-term business prospects in finalizing the launch of
LINUX For You. As far as making money is concerned, we are convinced that
businesses that help others save or make money can make money themselves.

LJ: Some criticism to
LFY centers on the quality of its CDs, both content and
media quality. Any plans to revamp this? What are the options? Would the model of
providing the latest applications instead of distributions work better?

RC: The quality check procedure for the
LFY CD has been tightened; we expect
improvements on that front. As far as the content is concerned, we face a
battle of our goal versus the needs of the community.

We have set LINUX For You goal as "Shifting Linux (open source) from
Labs to Offices." Thus, we have been placing more importance on providing
one distribution that is easy to use and has virtually no installation
hassles.

Knoppix, which was slightly customized by us, seemed to be a perfect choice. To
cater to the needs of the techies, we bundled software on top of Knoppix
based on themes, such as the Developer's Special that came with our July
2003 issue.

However, the community craves different distributions. Acceding to
their demands, we have been bundling different distributions (which share a
similar ease of use) in the last two issues. Soon, we plan to launch dual
CDs, one catering to the newbies and the other catering
to the experts.

LJ: What do you see as the potential for GNU/Linux in India?

RC: It's tremendous. Just like other
developing nations, India also needs productivity
solutions that provide the best RoI [return-on-investment], and open source
definitely offers that.

Plus, with our huge IT talent pool, the Indian IT industry does not need to pay
a heavy premium for recruiting or retraining the necessary man-power. And,
once we go into various off-shoots, such as thin clients, the proposal becomes
very attractive even for social initiatives in education,
rural connectivity and e-governance segments.

LJ: What is needed to make free/libre
and open-source software grow in the country?

RC: Two-pronged efforts: first, creating and nurturing the talent pool for
developing open source software, which is being addressed by initiatives
such as the Bangalore-Linux meet [an ambitious, community-organised event
attracting nearly 2000 participants each December, held for the past three
years], various LUGs, the Free Software Foundation-India and partially by
LINUX For You, too. This then has to be followed up
by demonstrating (selling) the benefits of open source to the decision
makers, so that we have a healthy internal consumption as well.

We face the biggest threat from China over our status of IT superpower,
not because of proprietary software development but because China is pushing
both development efforts on the open-source platform followed by initiatives
to boost its own internal consumption of the same. We could end up being the
largest exporter of a technology platform but shrink to the second spot
in terms of global consumption.

This event fails to rope in the best speakers. The LinuxForYou team should have instead backed something like the Linux Bangalore 2003, which did not have a media partner. Also, the statement that New Delhi and other surrounding cities by Rahul is completely baseless.

The Software Developer pass is priced at an exhorbitant Rs.10000, per developer for 3 days, which is not possible for a small time developer.

I am not surprised that the biggest bigwigs in the world of GNU/Linux, namely Novell,HP and IBM are showing leukewarm response to it.

More than the ``Freedom`` factor provided by GNU/Linux, this show is going to be more focussed on the ``Price`` factor of it. Such a show can never help the community as it fails to highlight the very basis of it. Iam pretty sure Rahul Chopra didn't mention anything like GNU in in Linux ... or Free Software in his Open Source. This is merely a corporate gimmickry as GNU/Linux has become an interesting money making proposition lately. No wonder Rahul Chopra denied to name his mag GNU/Linux For You despite repeated requests from the community including RMS Himself.

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